Browse Advertising

Try As He Might, Glenn Beck Can't Turn a Paperback Book into a Flat-Screen TV

Glenn Beck is great on TV; he shouts, he scoffs, and he cries. But when he writes, one thing becomes clear: The man has absolutely nothing of consequence to say. In Common Sense, Beck uses every trick in the book to cover this up.

As David Grann describes him in The Lost City of Z, British explorer Percy Fawcett was the last of the Victorian era's hard-bitten adventurers, a man who waded "into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose."

Instead of challenging his beliefs, Shepard's descent into poverty only adds to the already vexing verisimilitudes of poverty. Instead of offering insight into what he experienced and what that means to others like him, Shepard offers a book dazed by reality and confused by how to respond to it.

More by Rick Lax

The title is misleading because John Mulholland’s essay (on how the CIA could exploit conjurers’ tricks for covert purposes) isn’t a “manual of deception." Most of the essay is about one thing: how to secretly drop poison into a bad guy’s drink.

More by Las Vegas Weekly

The title is misleading because John Mulholland’s essay (on how the CIA could exploit conjurers’ tricks for covert purposes) isn’t a “manual of deception." Most of the essay is about one thing: how to secretly drop poison into a bad guy’s drink.

Whenever I read or hear "meta" or "postmodern" or "fiercely honest," I usually head for a lowbrow potboiler. But I'm not sure how else to describe The Adderall Diaries, a fiercely honest, postmodern work that's also more compulsively readable than the most pulpish thrillers.

Hornby's sixth fictional offering, Juliet, Naked, features another developmentally arrested male who's trapped in a codependent relationship with his record collection. Chances are Fidelity fiends are not amused. Here's why.